What does IoT mean for the future of data management?

IoT is hailed to be hugely advantageous for data management, but organisations must keep ahead of its challenges to reap these benefits.

2nd September 2019

Internet of Things is growing faster than you can say IoT, and it’s reinventing data management as it goes. In fact, IDC predict that the growth of connected IoT devices will generate 79.4ZB of data in 2025. As enterprises jump on the IoT bandwagon, how can they better prepare for the surge in data produced?

How IoT is driving data in business

Data management is a crucial component of business today that allows companies to assess their data more intricately. Not only this, good data management helps companies build immunity to errors and risks, while bettering efficiency. With IoT, companies can reap the added benefits of generating more meaningful insights.

IoT also works in, or near, real time, increasing insights and keeping enterprises at the forefront of any changes. These insights enable businesses to better assess the smooth (or not) running of operations and to build on this to improve productivity or performance.

Staying secure

Since being the new kid on the block, enterprises have been welcoming IoT with open arms. However, as shiny as IoT presents itself, as its deployment increases, so does the volume of data generated. Managing data of this amount is no easy feat and should be at the forefront of enterprise data initiatives.

A huge bonus of IoT is its interconnectivity, which enables businesses to enjoy a more higher quality of insights. However, the more interconnectivity you have, the higher the risk of breaches. Unfortunately, many companies have fallen victim to IoT excitement and did not properly screen their connected devices for cybersecurity, thus landing them in hot water. Therefore, an important consideration is to ensure you are working as securely as possible. This needn’t be a costly endeavour (you could simply set up a separate network for your IoT data) and will certainly save you from the expenses you’ll be confronted with fixing a hack.

Preparing for the influx

As already established, a key characteristic of IoT is the sheer amount of data it generates. However, the infrastructures of yesterday are most likely not going to handle the data of tomorrow. With more IoT endpoints than ever and the likelihood of this growing, it’s time to step back and ask ourselves: how will we handle all this data?

Organisations must consider whether they have suitable storage for continued growth of data. If IDC’s predictions are correct, then many current infrastructures are immediately redundant. Instead, organisations must seek high-capacity and high-speed storage. The cloud is an obvious choice, for all its cost-effective and operational benefits. However, this requires organisations to work with a challenging number of cloud providers, leading to increased complexity.

Moving forward

It’s easy to put all your trust in IoT, since it has effectively become synonymous to “revolutionising”. However, organisations must ensure they do not get ‘IoT happy’ and, instead, approach with caution. IoT will introduce many ‘firsts’, but not all of these are necessarily good.

For more on how IoT is transforming businesses, check out this opinion piece by Jurjis Rapoports, Cybersecurity Lead at Deloitte.